It was some ten years ago that we first met John Greenleaf Whittier, the
poet of the moral sentiment and of the heart and faith of the people of
America. It chanced that we had then been making notes, with much
interest, upon the genius of the Semitic nations. That peculiar
simplicity, centrality, and intensity which caused them to originate
Monotheism from two independent centres, the only systems of pure
Monotheism which have had power in history,--while the same
characteristics made their poetry always lyrical, never epic or
dramatic, and their most vigorous thought a perpetual sacrifice on the
altars of the will,--this had strongly impressed us; and we seemed to
find in it a striking contrast to the characteristic genius of the Aryan
or Indo-Germanic nations, with their imaginative interpretations of the
religious sentiment, with their epic and dramatic expansions, and their
taste for breadth and variety. Somewhat warm with these notions, we came
to a meeting with our poet, and the first thought, on seeing him, was,
"The head of a Hebrew prophet!" It is not Hebrew,--Saracen rather; the
Jewish type is heavier, more material; but it corresponded strikingly to
the conceptions we had formed of the Southern Semitic crania, and the
whole make of the man was of the same character. The high cranium, so
lofty especially in the dome,--the slight and symmetrical backward slope
of the _whole_ head,--the powerful level brows, and beneath these the
dark, deep eyes, so full of shadowed fire,--the Arabian complexion,--the
sharp-cut, intense lines of the face,--the light, tall, erect
stature,--the quick axial poise of the movement,--all these answered
with singular accuracy to the picture of those preacher-races which had
been shaping itself in our imagination. Indeed, the impression was so
strong as to induce some little feeling of embarrassment. It seemed
slightly awkward and insipid to be meeting a prophet here in a parlor
and in a spruce masquerade of modern costume, shaking hands, and saying,
"Happy to meet you," after the fashion of our feeble civilities.
All this came vividly to remembrance, on taking up, the other day,
Whittier's last book of poems, "In War-Time,"--a volume that has been
welcomed all over the land with enthusiastic delight. Had it been no
more, however, than a mere private reminiscence, it should, at present,
have remained private. But have we not here a key to Whittier's genius?
Is not this Semitic centrality and simplicity, this prophetic depth,
reality, and vigor, without great lateral and intellectual range, its
especial characteristic? He has not the liberated, light-winged Greek
imagination,--imagination not involved and included in the religious
sentiment, but playing in epic freedom and with various interpretation
between religion and intellect; he has not the flowing, Protean,
imaginative sympathy, the power of instant self-identification with all
forms of character and life, which culminated in Shakspeare; but that
imaginative vitality which lurks in faith and conscience, producing what
we may call _ideal force of heart_, this he has eminently; and it is
this central, invisible, Semitic heat which makes him a poet.
Imagination exists in him, not as a separable faculty, but as a pure
vital suffusion. Hence he is an _inevitable_ poet. There is no drop of
his blood, there is no fibre of his brain, which does not crave poetic
expression. Mr. Carlyle desires to postpone poetry; but as Providence
did not postpone Whittier, his wishes can hardly be gratified. Ours is,
indeed, one of the plainest of poets. He is intelligible and acceptable
to those who have little either of poetic culture or of fancy and
imagination. Whoever has common sense and a sound heart has the powers
by which he may be appreciated. And yet he is not only a real poet, but
he is _all_ poet. The Muses have not merely sprinkled his brow; he was
baptized by immersion. His notes are not many; but in them Nature
herself sings. He is a sparrow that half sings, half chirps, on a bush,
not a lark that floods with orient hilarity the skies of morning; but
the bush burns, like that which Moses saw, and the sparrow herself is
part of the divine flame.
This, then, is the general statement about Whittier. His genius is
Hebrew, Biblical,--more so than that of any other poet now using the
English language. In other words, he is organically a poem of the Will.
He is a flower of the moral sentiment,--and of the moral sentiment, not
in its flexible, feminine, vine-like dependence and play, but in its
masculine rigor, climbing in direct, vertical affirmation, like a
forest-pine. In this respect he affiliates with Wordsworth, and, going
farther back, with Milton, whose tap-root was Hebrew, though in the vast
epic flowering of his genius he passed beyond the imaginative range of
Semitic mind.
In thus identifying our bard, spiritually, with a broad form of the
genius of mankind, we already say with emphasis that his is indeed a
Life. Yes, once more, a real Life. He is a nature. He was _born_, not
manufactured. Here, once again, the old, mysterious, miraculous
processes of spiritual assimilation. Here, a genuine root-clutch upon
the elements of man's experience, and an inevitable, indomitable
working-up of them into human shape. To look at him without discerning
this vital depth and reality were as good as no looking at all.
Moreover, the man and the poet are one and the same. His verse is no
literary Beau-Brummelism, but a _re_-presentation of that which is
presented in his consciousness. First, there is inward vital conversion
of the elements of his experience, then verse, or version,--first the
soul, then the body. His voice, as such, has little range, nor is it any
marvel of organic perfection; on the contrary, there is many a voice
with nothing at all in it which far surpasses his in mere vocal
excellence; only in this you can hear the deep refrain of Nature, and of
Nature chanting her moral ideal.
We shall consider Whittier's poetry in this light,--as a vital
effluence, as a product of his being; and citations will be made, not by
way of culling "beauties,"--a mode of criticism to which there are grave
objections,--but of illustrating total growth, quality, and power. Our
endeavor will be to get at, so far as possible, the processes of vital
action, of spiritual assimilation, which go on in the poet, and then to
trace these in his poetry.
God gave Whittier a deep, hot, simple, strenuous, and yet ripe and
spherical, nature, whose twin necessities were, first, that it _must_
lay an intense grasp upon the elements of its experience, and, secondly,
that it _must_ work these up into some form of melodious completeness.
History and the world gave him Quakerism, America, and Rural Solitude;
and through this solitude went winding the sweet, old Merrimac stream,
the river that we would not wish to forget, even by the waters of the
river of life! And it is into these elements that his genius, with its
peculiar vital simplicity and intensity, strikes root. Historic reality,
the great _facts_ of his time, are the soil in which he grows, as they
are with all natures of depth and energy. "We did not wish," said
Goethe, "to learn, but to live."
Quakerism and America--America ideally true to herself--quickly became,
in his mind, one and the same. Quakerism means _divine democracy_.
George Fox was the first forerunner, the John Baptist, of the new
time,--leather-aproned in the British wilderness. Seeing the whole world
dissolving into individualism, he did not try to tie it together, after
the fashion of great old Hooker, with new cords of ecclesiasticism; but
he did this,--he affirmed a Mount Sinai in the heart of the individual,
and gave to the word _person_ an INFINITE depth. To sound that
word thus was his function in history. No wonder that England trembled
with terror, and then blazed with rage. No wonder that many an ardent
James Naylor was crazed with the new wine.
Puritanism meant the same thing at bottom; but, accepting the more legal
and learned interpretations of Calvin, it was, to a great degree,
involved in the past, and also turned its eye more to political
mechanisms. For this very reason it kept up more of fellowship with the
broad world, and had the benefit of this in a larger measure of social
fructification. Whatever is separated dies. Quakerism uttered a word so
profound that the utterance made it insular; and, left to itself, it
began to be lost in itself. Nevertheless, Quakerism and Puritanism are
the two richest historic soils of modern time.
Our young poet got at the heart of the matter. He learned to utter the
word _Man_ so believingly that it sounded down into depths of the divine
and infinite. He learned to say, with Novalis, "He touches heaven who
touches a human body." And when he uttered this word, "Man," in full,
_social_ breadth, lo! it changed, and became AMERICA.
There begins the genesis of the conscious poet. All the depths of his
heart rang with the resonance of these imaginations,--Man, America;
meaning divine depth of manhood, divine spontaneity and rectitude of
social relationship.
But what! what is this? Just as he would raise his voice to chant the
new destinies of man, a harsh, heartless, human bark, and therewith a
low, despairing stifle of sobbing, came to his ear! It is the bark of
the auctioneer, "Going! going!"--it is the sobbing of the slave on the
auction-block! And _this_, too, O Poet, this, too, is America! So you
are not secure of your grand believing imaginations yet, but must fight
for them. The faith of your heart would perish, if it did not put on
armor.
Whittier's poetic life has three principal epochs. The first opens and
closes with the "Voices of Freedom." We may use Darwin's phrase, and
call it the period of Struggle for Life. His ideal itself is endangered;
the atmosphere he would inhale is filled with poison; a desolating moral
prosaicism springs up to justify a great social ugliness, and spreads in
the air where his young hopes would try their wings; and in the
imperfect strength of youth he has so much of dependence upon actual
surroundings, that he must either war with their evil or succumb to it.
Of surrender his daring and unselfish soul never for a moment thought.
Never did a trained falcon stoop upon her quarry with more fearlessness,
or a spirit of less question, than that which bore our young hero to the
moral fray; yet the choice was such as we have indicated.
The faith for which he fought is uttered with spirit in a stanza from
"The Branded Hand."
"In thy lone and long night-watches, sky above and wave below,
Thou didst learn a higher wisdom than the babbling schoolmen know:
God's stars and silence taught thee, as His angels only can,
That the one, sole sacred thing beneath the cope of heaven is Man."
Our poet, too, conversing with God's stars and silence, has come to an
understanding with himself, and made up his mind. That Man's being has
an ideal or infinite value, and that all consecrated institutions are
shams, and their formal consecration a blasphemous mockery, save as they
look to that fact,--this in his Merrimac solitudes has come forth
clearly to his soul, and, like old Hebrew David, he has said, "My heart
is fixed." Make other selections who will, he has concluded to face life
and death on this basis.
Did he not choose as a poet MUST? Between a low moral
prosaicism and a generous moral ideal was it possible for him to
hesitate? Are there those whose real thought is, that man, beyond his
estimation as an animal, represents only a civil value,--that he is but
the tailor's "dummy" and clothes-horse of institutions? Do they tell our
poet that his notion of man as a divine revelation, as a pure spiritual
or absolute value, is a mere dream, discountenanced by the truth of the
universe? He might answer, "Let the universe look to it, then! In that
case, I stand upon my dream as the only worthy reality." What were a
mere pot-and-pudding universe to him? Does Mr. Holyoke complain that
these hot idealisms make the culinary kettles of the world boil over?
Kitchen-prudences are good for kitchens; but the sun kindles his great
heart without special regard to them.
These "Voices of Freedom" are no bad reading at the present day. They
are of that strenuous quality, that the light of battle brings to view a
finer print, which lay unseen between the lines. They are themselves
battles, and stir the blood like the blast of a trumpet. What a beat in
them of fiery pulses! What a heat, as of molten metal, or coal-mines
burning underground! What anger! What desire! And yet we have in vain
searched these poems to find one trace of base wrath, or of any
degenerate and selfish passion. He is angry, and sins not. The sun goes
down and again rises upon his wrath; and neither sets nor rises upon
aught freer from meanness and egoism. All the fires of his heart burn
for justice and mercy, for God and humanity; and they who are most
scathed by them _owe_ him no hatred in return, whether they _pay_ him
any or not.
Not a few of these verses seem written for the present day. Take the
following from the poem entitled, "Texas"; they might be deemed a call
for volunteers.
"Up the hill-side, down the glen,
Rouse the sleeping citizen,
Summon forth the might of men!
* * * * *
"Oh! for God and duty stand,
Heart to heart and hand to hand,
Round the old graves of the land.
"Whoso shrinks or falters now,
Whoso to the yoke would bow,--
Brand the craven on his brow!
"Perish party, perish clan!
Strike together, while ye can,
Like the arm of one strong man."
The Administration might have gone to these poems for a policy: he had
fought the battle before them.
"Have they wronged us? Let us, then,
Render back nor threats nor prayers;
Have they chained our freeborn men?
LET US UNCHAIN THEIRS!"
Or look at these concluding stanzas of "The Crisis," which is the last
of the "Voices." Has not our prophet written them for this very day?
"The crisis presses on us; face to face with us it stands,
With solemn lips of question, like the Sphinx in Egypt's sands!
This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin;
This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin;
Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal's cloudy crown,
We call the dews of blessing or the bolts of cursing down.
"By all for which the Martyrs bore their agony and shame,
By all the warning words of truth with which the Prophets came,
By the Future which awaits us, by all the hopes which cast
Their faint and trembling beams across the darkness of the Past,
And by the blessed thought of Him who for Earth's freedom died,
O my people! O my brothers! let us choose the righteous side.
"So shall the Northern pioneer go joyful on his way,
To wed Penobscot's waters to San Francisco's bay,
To make the rugged places smooth, and sow the vales with grain,
And bear, with Liberty and Law, the Bible in his train;
The mighty West shall bless the East, and sea shall answer sea,
And mountain unto mountain call, 'PRAISE GOD, FOR WE ARE FREE!'"
These are less to be named poems than pieces of rhythmic
oratory,--oratory crystallized into poetic form, and carrying that
deeper significance and force which from all vitalized form are
inseparable. A poem, every work of Art, must rest in itself; oratory is
a means toward a specific effect. The man who writes poems may have aims
which underlie and suffuse his work; but they must not be partial, they
must be coextensive with the whole spirit of man, and must enter his
work as the air enters his nostrils. The moment a definite, partial
effect is sought, the attitude of poetry begins to be lost. These
battle-pieces are therefore a warfare for the possession of the poet's
ideal, not the joyous life-breath of that ideal already victorious in
him. And the other poems of this first great epoch in his poetical life,
though always powerful, often beautiful, yet never, we think, show a
_perfect_ resting upon his own poetic heart.
In the year 1850 appeared the "Songs of Labor, and other Poems"; and in
these we reach the transition to his second epoch. Here he has already
recognized the pure ground of the poem,--
"Art's perfect forms no moral need,
And beauty is its own excuse,"--
but his modesty declines attempting that perfection, and assigns him a
lower place. He must still seek definite uses, though this use be to
lend imagination or poetic depth to daily labor:--
"But for the dull and flowerless weed
Some healing virtue still must plead,
And the rough ore must find its honors in its use.
"So haply these my simple lays
Of homely toil may serve to show
The orchard-bloom and tasselled maize
That skirt and gladden duty's ways,
The unsung beauty hid life's common things below."
Not pure gold as yet, but genuine silver. The aim at a definite use is
still apparent, as he himself perceives; but there is nevertheless a
constant native play into them of ideal feeling. It is no longer a
struggle for room to draw poetic breath in, but only the absence of a
perfectly free and unconscious poetic respiration. Yet they are sterling
poems, with the stamp of the mint upon them. And some of the strains are
such as no living man but Whittier has proven his power to produce.
"Ichabod," for example, is the purest and profoundest _moral_ lament, to
the best of our knowledge, in modern literature, whether American or
European. It is the grief of angels in arms over a traitor brother slain
on the battle-fields of heaven.
Two years later comes the "Chapel of the Hermits," and with it the
second epoch in Whittier's poetic career. The epoch of Culture we name
it. The poet has now passed the period of outward warfare. All the
arrows in the quiver of his noble wrath are spent. Now on the wrong and
shame of the land he looks down with deep, calm, superior eyes,
sorrowful, indeed, and reproving, but no longer perturbed. His hot,
eloquent, prophetic spirit now breathes freely, lurk in the winds of the
moment what poison may; for he has attained to those finer airs of
eternity which hide ever, like the luminiferous ether, in this
atmosphere of time; so that, like the scholar-hero of Schiller, he is
indeed "in the time, but not of it." Still his chant of high
encouragement shall fly forth on wings of music to foster the nobilities
of the land; still over the graves of the faithful dead he shall murmur
a requiem, whose chastened depth and truth relate it to other and better
worlds than this; still his lips utter brave rebuke, but it is a rebuke
that falls, like the song of an unseen bird, out of the sky, so purely
moral, so remote from earthly and egoistic passion, so sure and
reposeful, that verse is its natural embodiment. The home-elements of
his intellectual and moral life he has fairly assimilated; and his verse
in its mellowness and rhythmical excellence reflects this achievement of
his spirit.
But now, after the warfare, begins questioning. For modern culture has
come to him, as it comes to all, with its criticism, its science, its
wide conversation through books, its intellectual unrest; it has
looked him in the eye, and said, "_Are you sure?_ The dear old
traditions,--they are indeed _traditions_. The sweet customs which have
housed our spiritual and social life,--these are _customs_. Of what are
you SURE?" Matthew Arnold has recently said well (we cannot
quote the words) that the opening of the modern epoch consists in the
discovery that institutions and habitudes of the earlier centuries, in
which we have grown, are not absolute, and do not adjust themselves
perfectly to our mental wants. Thus are we thrown back upon our own
souls. We have to ask the first questions, and get such answer as we
may. The meaning of the modern world is this,--an epoch which, in the
midst of established institutions, of old consecrated habitudes of
thought and feeling, of populous nations which cannot cast loose from
ancient anchorage without peril of horrible wreck and disaster, has got
to take up man's life again from the beginning. Of modern life this is
the immediate key.
Our poet's is one of those deep and clinging natures which hold hard by
the heart of bygone times; but also he is of a nature so deep and
sensitive that the spiritual endeavor of the period must needs utter
itself in him. "ART THOU SURE?"--the voice went sounding
keenly, terribly, through the profound of his soul. And to this his
spirit, not without struggle and agony, but at length clearly, made
the faithful Hebrew response, "I TRUST." Bravely said, O
deep-hearted poet! Rest there! Rest there and thus on your own believing
filial heart, and on the Eternal, who in it accomplishes the miracle of
that confiding!
Not eminently endowed with discursive intellect,--not gifted with that
power, Homeric in kind and more than Homeric in degree, which might meet
the old mythic imaginations on, or rather above, their own level, and
out of them, together with the material which modern time supplies,
build in the skies new architectures, wherein not only the feeling, but
the _imagination_ also, of future ages might house,--our poet comes with
Semitic directness to the heart of the matter: he takes the divine
_Yea_, though it be but a simple _Yea_, and no syllable more, in his own
soul, and holds childlike by that. And he who has asked the questions of
the time and reached this conclusion,--he who has stood alone with his
unclothed soul, and out of that nakedness before the Eternities said,
"_I trust_,"--he is victorious; he has entered the modern epoch, and has
not lost the spiritual crown from his brows.